Tuesday, August 1, 2017

NASA photo, July 18, 1969: " The face of astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot of Apollo
11 lunar landing mission, is seen in this color reproduction, taken
from the third television transmission, from the Apollo 11 spacecraft
during its trans-lunar journey toward the moon. Aldrin is inside the
Lunar Module (LM)."

“In the early days of the space program NASA, aided by a
questionable agreement with Life magazine, sought to portray the
first astronauts as the embodiment of American values. Good husbands,
fathers, family men, patriots, professionals. It would have been
naïve even at that time to expect them all to be from the same
cookie cutter mold. Perhaps that mold was legitimate in one dimension
only: they were all competent, even outstanding, pilots.” - Dwayne
Day, “Buzz Aldrin will not stop talking,” published on The Space
Review, May 15, 2017

“[Joan Crawford] was a professional. We did one picture
together. Our lives intersected. That’s it.” - Bette Davis played
by Susan Sarandon in Feud: Bette and Joan

The subheadings in Dwayne Day’s piece “Buzz Aldrin will not stop talking,” which was published in The Space Review in May,
asked the reader, “What do we owe our heroes? What do our heroes
owe us?” Day later added, “Our heroes are rarely who we want them
to be.” Day underscored in his piece that the tempestuous Aldrin
was the first of the Apollo astronauts to tarnish the luster of the
“perfect Astronaut” image with his 1973 autobiography, Return
to Earth. In that
tome, Aldrin discussed the less pleasant aspects of his life in
then-unprecedented detail, even dishing intimate
details about his
alcoholism, adultery, and depression, which were taboo topics at the
time. While Aldrin’s
achievements cannot be discounted, he has always been kind of an “odd
bird” compared to his contemporaries.

Despite that, Aldrin
wouldn’t be the last astronaut to dismantle the image of the
“astronaut hero.”
Walt Cunningham’s All-American
Boys, originally
published in 1977, functioned as the Ball Fourof astronaut
autobiographies. Cunningham spared very
little in his
reminiscences about his colleagues. Two more recent entries in the
genre, Al Worden’s Falling
to Earth and Donn
Eisele’s Apollo Pilot
(both co-written with
Francis French) further tore down the image of the perfect Astronaut,
the infallible
knight clad
in a white A7L spacesuit.

The Apollo astronauts, probably
more than their shuttle counterparts, occupy a strange place in
history. Many were test
pilots, and all were suddenly thrust into an unforgiving spotlight
with little to no warning.Some of them wore their
“fame” with more dignity than others. One fictional book released
in May, Island of
Clouds by Gerald Brennan, furthers Day’s investigation into the myth of “astronaut
as hero,” shedding light
upon the “fame monster,” and the forced notion of brotherhood and
camaraderie among the
astronaut corps. Warning:
minor book spoilers included.